how can I have a Global variable (dim AllTeams as New TeamList) only run not on postback

To expand a bit on what Sergey said, there are several ways you can temporarily store data between page loads. Unfortunately, all of them have their drawbacks.

Probably the easiest is to save your data in the Session object. Any object can be stored. Classes and other complex objects should be tagged with the Serializable attribute. The downside is that Session has a tendency to reset, especially if you are storing large quantities: it is fine for holding data from one page while the next one loads, but it is not reliable enough to be considered "global."

The next option is cookies. This really isn't a very good option, in my opinion: the size of a given cookie is limited to 4k, which may not be big enough to hold your data, and browsers can be set to ignore cookies, which makes this very undependable.

You could compress the data into an ASCII format and pass it as part of the URL. This is done on some web systems to support cookieless browsers, but it has a lot of limitations as well as potentially fatal security flaws (you probably do not want someone bookmarking a URL with encrypted data.) Avoid this entirely.

The fourth option, which is what I will often use, is to use the Profile structure. There is a bit of a learning curve, but this essentially links your web app with a SQL database, with infrastructure managed by the Framework. Once it is in place, it is easy to use. It is also much more flexible, as any type or quantity of data can be stored and the data is guaranteed to persist until the user times out.

You could also try to roll your own Profile alternative, with you manually creating data stores (XML structures, database entries, comma delimited text files, whatever) as needed to hold your information. The problem is making sure that each web user has an ID that will remain consistent over time -- Session ID can change, for example -- and that old files get cleaned up regularly. These are hurdles, but can be overcome.

Within the limits of HTML, those are the options.

You can use application session to share the information between users.

I have used Session("whatever") to use variables throughout the entire codebehind.vb page, but is there an easier way? I mean, if I'm using several public functions within the codebehind.vb page, in order to pass the value of the variable from one function to the other, I noticed I always have to save the session and retrieve it on the other function and assign it to a variable within the scope of that function... any easier way (other than using static, as Patrik mentioned above.

Thanks!